- Joined
- Jan 23, 2021
- Messages
- 598
- Points
- 353
Welcome aboard!
-
Win a Free Custom Engraved Brass Coin!!!
As a way to introduce our brass coins to the community, we will raffle off a free coin during the month of August. Follow link ABOVE for instructions for entering.
Welcome Hemadri to the forums and greetings from Texas! Magic Mike
Once you've gotten up to speed, I'll be looking forward to reading posts here from a mariner from Kolkata who's scratch-building some accurate models of the now-disappearing indigenous Bengali watercraft! From what I've heard, you have a relatively new and very good government regional maritime cultural research institute and museum in Kolkata that has lots of models and ethnographic documentation.
"The Boat Museum is a public museum that is solely dedicated to the documentation of the history of boats in the Bengal region. Located in the Institute of Cultural Research in Kankurgachi, Kolkata, the museum is a rare initiative that aims to preserve the memories of Bengal's riverine past. The museum has been referred to as India's first museum dedicated to understanding boats, indigenous boat-making, and their heritage. Other similar establishments include the Kolkata Port Trust Maritime Archives and Heritage Centre, located on Strand Road, Kolkata.
... With the vanishing of many of Bengal's indigenous boats and boat-making traditions, cultural activities like boats racing one another too decreased insofar as it has become a very rare sighting now. Thus, the idea behind the Boat Museum is also to raise awareness regarding the riparian ecosystem of Bengal which does not typically find mention in any textbook or news and has almost disappeared from collective memory. The museum is a testament to one of Bengal's important traditions that stand to be lost in time.
Boat Museum presently houses "46 wooden replicas of boats" that depicts Bengal's boat heritage. From cargo boats of Sunderbans, coastal fishing boats, and popular flat-bottomed boats of Northern Bengal to all-purpose boats known as dinghi have been featured in the museum. The museum also exhibits a replica of the poet Rabindranath Tagore's boat called Padma and a replica of a boat from the Mohenjo-daro era.
Since boat-making is a tradition passed on from generation to generation, typically performed by communities that have become marginalized now, all the boat model exhibits presented in the museum have been made by the Rajbangshis of South Dinajpur district to highlight traditional craftsmanship."
en.wikipedia.org
If you want to build a kit model of Beagle, that's fine, but there are lots and lots of kit-built Beagle models (some more accurate than others.) After you have that one "out of your system," please do realize that as a mariner who "speaks the language" of mariners, you are uniquely situated to do original research and perhaps make valuable contributions to the maritime historical record before the primary sources are lost forever. You may well be able to find some of those now-near-extinct local watercraft of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta (often half-sunk and rotting in some backwater or stored for decades in an old barn) which can be measured and modeled, as well as finding elderly boatbuilders and watermen who can provide oral histories of the boats and the men that sailed them which are, or are about to be, no more.
You've got a wonderful opportunity that few serious modelers ever see come their way. If I were you, my first stop would be the Boat Museum in Kolkata! I'm betting you're sitting on top of an historical ship and boat modeling gold mine at a moment in time that will soon be no more!
"The Boat Museum is a public museum that is solely dedicated to the documentation of the history of boats in the Bengal region. Located in the Institute of Cultural Research in Kankurgachi, Kolkata, the museum is a rare initiative that aims to preserve the memories of Bengal's riverine past. The museum has been referred to as India's first museum dedicated to understanding boats, indigenous boat-making, and their heritage. Other similar establishments include the Kolkata Port Trust Maritime Archives and Heritage Centre, located on Strand Road, Kolkata.
... With the vanishing of many of Bengal's indigenous boats and boat-making traditions, cultural activities like boats racing one another too decreased insofar as it has become a very rare sighting now. Thus, the idea behind the Boat Museum is also to raise awareness regarding the riparian ecosystem of Bengal which does not typically find mention in any textbook or news and has almost disappeared from collective memory. The museum is a testament to one of Bengal's important traditions that stand to be lost in time.
Boat Museum presently houses "46 wooden replicas of boats" that depicts Bengal's boat heritage. From cargo boats of Sunderbans, coastal fishing boats, and popular flat-bottomed boats of Northern Bengal to all-purpose boats known as dinghi have been featured in the museum. The museum also exhibits a replica of the poet Rabindranath Tagore's boat called Padma and a replica of a boat from the Mohenjo-daro era.
Since boat-making is a tradition passed on from generation to generation, typically performed by communities that have become marginalized now, all the boat model exhibits presented in the museum have been made by the Rajbangshis of South Dinajpur district to highlight traditional craftsmanship."
Boat Museum, Kolkata - Wikipedia
If you want to build a kit model of Beagle, that's fine, but there are lots and lots of kit-built Beagle models (some more accurate than others.) After you have that one "out of your system," please do realize that as a mariner who "speaks the language" of mariners, you are uniquely situated to do original research and perhaps make valuable contributions to the maritime historical record before the primary sources are lost forever. You may well be able to find some of those now-near-extinct local watercraft of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta (often half-sunk and rotting in some backwater or stored for decades in an old barn) which can be measured and modeled, as well as finding elderly boatbuilders and watermen who can provide oral histories of the boats and the men that sailed them which are, or are about to be, no more.
You've got a wonderful opportunity that few serious modelers ever see come their way. If I were you, my first stop would be the Boat Museum in Kolkata! I'm betting you're sitting on top of an historical ship and boat modeling gold mine at a moment in time that will soon be no more!